Indexed Assignment

Contents

Here's a picture of the audience.

The Question

Why doesn’t changing an element of a logical array change its logicalness? Most arithmetic operations remove the logicalness from an array; it would seem to me that changing an element of the array (at least to something other than 0 or 1) should either throw an error or similarly modify its logicalness.

An Example

Let's show an example. First create a logical array.

clear all
A = magic(3);
B = A > 6;
whos

  Name      Size            Bytes  Class      Attributes

  A         3x3                72  double               
  B         3x3                 9  logical              

Now let's do some arithmetic with logical arrays mixed with doubles.

C = B + 1;
D = B;
D(1:5) = 2
whos A B C D

D =
     1     1     0
     1     1     1
     1     1     0
  Name      Size            Bytes  Class      Attributes

  A         3x3                72  double               
  B         3x3                 9  logical              
  C         3x3                72  double               
  D         3x3                 9  logical              

What you see is that A and C are double arrays, while B and D are logical.

The Answer

Indexed assignment, that is, D(1:5) = 2 has always preserved the type of the array being indexed. Only values may change, not the type. You'd only get an error if there was not a valid conversion routine from the type on the right-hand side to the type stored on the left.

If you simply concatenate values, you also find that the output is logical:

E = [D ; B]

E =
     1     1     0
     1     1     1
     1     1     0
     1     0     0
     0     0     1
     0     1     0

To see this with another datatype, let's look at string array.

firstname = 'Loren'
lastname = [83   104   117   114   101]
name = firstname
name(end+2:end+1+length(lastname)) = lastname

firstname =
Loren
lastname =
    83   104   117   114   101
name =
Loren
name =
Loren Shure

If I just use straight concatenation, here's what happens

newname = [firstname, ' ', lastname]

newname =
Loren Shure

Arithmetic

If I perform arithmetic between mixed types, where one is numeric and one is not, I instead get a numeric answer.

name - 32

ans =
  Columns 1 through 8
    44    79    82    69    78   -32    51    72
  Columns 9 through 11
    85    82    69

Thoughts?

The fact that you get results with different datatypes depends on whether you are doing a numerical calculation or assigning to an array. Has the behavior been what you need or have you found it confusing? Let me know here.

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® 7.4